First, when a potential client searches for your law firm, what do they find? I tried “William Peacock attorney,” “William Peacock lawyer,” and “Law Office of William C. Peacock.” I found my website, Avvo, Yelp, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a few other pages you would expect. Each query returned different results, which is why it is important to try a few variants on you and your firm’s name.

You might find that your online reputation includes unfavorable results, including negative reviews. But you can turn any unfavorable results on their head by being proactive (by setting up your own sites, controlling your directory listings, and asking for reviews), being positive (in responding to criticism), and being prolific (in producing positive speech about your firm).

Be Proactive: Boost Your Online Reputation By Asking for Reviews

Happy customers are actually more likely to leave feedback that dissatisfied ones, especially when the services are high-cost or high-stress like legal services. The only caveat is that most states have rules against offering anything of value in exchange for a good review. Be sure to read up on your state’s advertising rules to make sure your request is compliant.

Reach out to your most satisfied clients after their matter has concluded with a “Thank You, oh and by the way, here is my Yelp page” note—it’s shameless, but it works. While it may feel strange to ask, it’s worth making it part of your file closing procedure to actively ask for feedback. There are plenty of tools to make it easy to do so.

Be Positive: Handling Negative Reviews and Third-Party Sites

Even the best, most attentive, and empathetic attorneys will receive a negative review one day.

The law is an uncertain business, dealing with stressful matters where success often means achieving the best possible bad outcome. And clients, being human, are sometimes saddled with unreasonable expectations. Over time, and given a sufficient volume of reviews, the overall tenor of the reviews for a practice should paint an accurate picture. But any given review may widely miss the mark. Accepting this reality is the first step in managing your online reputation.

There is no easy remedy for bad online reviews—the only cure is to respond with a kind message, and work to earn more positive reviews to outweigh the negative ones. The former goes a long way: I’ve seen many Yelp-ers backtrack on a negative review and up it to a more palatable three-star rating after a business contacted them about their experience and did their best to make amends.

Ethics are also a huge consideration here. When responding to negative reviews, you cannot disclose details of the case that are confidential. And even if privilege is waived, do you really want to be the jerk attorney who is airing a client’s dirty laundry online? Instead, respond with a message apologizing for any substandard customer service and requesting that the person contact your firm to make it right—it shows the public that you care about client satisfaction.

On another ethics note: don’t put up fake reviews. For one, there are rules about false advertising. Second, Yelp filters a lot of reviews, fake or real, based on whether their algorithm picks them up as spam. Likely triggers for filtering include multiple reviews from the same physical location (their servers will read the reviewer’s IP address and if multiple reviews come from the same internet connection, they’ll probably be flagged—this has been the case in a few Yelp lawsuits over reviews and “extortion”) or reviews from people who registered that same day and only reviewed a single business. If you try to fake it, they will probably catch it.

Third-Party Sites

Some disgruntled folks won’t be happy with venting on Yelp and RipOffReport.com—they’ll also set up blogs and other websites to “expose” an attorney. They may even call themselves citizen “journalists” or “watchdogs.”

The most pernicious example of this was the Crystal Cox and Marc Randazza saga. She set up sites trumpeting the alleged misdeeds of a financial company, then allegedly offered online reputation management services to undue the damage that she allegedly caused. The Ninth Circuit nixed a $2.5 million verdict against her, even while citing a New York Times article on her alleged extortionist tactics, but she also aimed her blogging and domain name tactics on a lawyer and his family, including his then three-year-old daughter.

Hopefully, you’ll never have to deal with anyone who is this … motivated to write about you. But if you do, the cure is the same as it is for a negative review—more positive speech and, for extreme cases like this one, to hire someone who has experience with domain name disputes and cybersquatting to handle the dispute through the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Be Prolific: Build Positive Content

There is an old advertising adage that when it comes to expensive purchases, “long copy sells.” A person who is prepared to spend serious money wants as much information as possible. Such purchasers are far less likely to respond to buzzwords or taglines.

On top of this is the rapid growth of consumer reviews and increasing suspicion of products and services that have no reviews. Consider your own behavior when researching products on Amazon, hotels on TripAdvisor, or restaurants on Yelp. What does an absence of reviews make you think? Building up online information about you and your law firm by soliciting reviews, blog posts, articles, and completing of online profiles ensures that any potential client researching your services will have that “long copy,” a wealth of information to rely upon in making their decision to retain you.

Bottom Line: Control the Narrative

A bad review can be countered by a positive response and a few positive reviews. A blogger’s rage-filled rants against you can be countered by others bloggers’ positive posts, and if they cross the line into extortion, a protracted legal dispute. And when it comes to good online reputation management, all but the biggest scandals can be drowned out with positive information on sites and profiles that you control. Remember those free directory listings we talked about? Each of those is likely to rank highly in search results because of their authority: they have millions of pages of content and lots of websites link to them as a source of reliable information.

Get a quality website for your practice, and link to it from all of those directory pages, and it’s likely that most of your search results will be a mixture of those less than positive reviews (that you’ve responded to appropriately) and the glowing ones you want people to see.

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Willie Peacock

Willie Peacock is a lawyer, marketing, and technology enthusiast whose career has zig-zagged between the three fields more times than he'd be able to recount.
Since launching his career in the Great Recession, he has embraced a non-traditional career path, including stops with the largest legal marketing company, associate attorney and director of marketing for a multi-million dollar Family Law firm in California, Search Engine Marketing (PPC) manager for a military veterans' website, and when life and licensure has allowed, solo legal practice. He has written for Thomson Reuters, Clio, and the Daily Journal and regularly presents at conferences on legal marketing and reputation management.
He is licensed in seven states, including New York, where he still works in marketing and has a retirement division (QDROs) legal practice spanning CA, MO, KS, IA, ND, NY and NJ.